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Here’s an old article from 1934, lamenting the decline of Halloween…
Halloween is coming soon and we’re getting very excited. It won’t be long until those of us who passionate about the night and things that bump in it, can openly celebrate the darkness.
But it hasn’t always been that way. We recently found this article from the Aberdeen Journal (Wednesday, 31 October 1934) lamenting the decline in Halloween. Thankfully Halloween is as strong as ever, but it’s worth reading this writer’s call to celebrate Halloween as a British institution…

“Halloween. Time was when this day was the greatest social festival of the Scottish year.
Halloween and its innocent amusements for generations provided poets and prose-writers – the former often indistinguishable from the latter – with themes for their lucubrations; and certainly did most heartily entertain those who participated in it.
But time was and time is, as the old play had it; and what was is different from what is.
The venerable and natural Halloween has gone.
It could not possibly remain.
It belonged to pastoral and humble civilisation, versed in ancient tradition, possessed of scanty leisure and material wealth, but still full enough of the simple joys of life to be ready and able to take advantage of a good opportunity for indulging in Hence came the popularity of Halloween, of Yule, and of Beltane.
To-day our civilisation is urban and complicated; leisure is abundant and distractions are infinitely various; and so Halloween has come to be regarded as tiresome and silly and to be forgotten when we “put “away childish things”.
A few clubs and associations, a few remote communities, may still celebrate the great evening with all its time-honoured rites, but the revival gives the impression of being little artificial —as if we were for a few hours reverting to Kilmarnock bonnets and cruisies, “nappy” ale and all the other externals life in Scotland two centuries ago.
It is a-great pity that Halloween should have become an anachronism, but it was bound to follow the stagecoach and the plough-ox.”